Benign Betrayal:
Capitalist Intervention
in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, 1890-1910

By John Hennen

Volume 50 (1991), pp. 46-62

Prior to the late nineteenth century, social and business
relationships in rural Appalachian communities were predicated on
tradition-bound personal principles more than rigidly defined legal
codes and formal business contracts. But by the 1890s, economic
changes were transforming Appalachia from a region of stable
self-sufficiency to one of dependence and poverty. Mountaineers
steadily lost control over their social and economic environment,
as commercial and industrial forces dominated the human and mineral
resources of the region. New political, educational, legal, and
religious institutions undermined traditional structure. The new
institutional forms mirrored the interests of a national industrial
economy, grounded in the liberal doctrines of capitalist
expansionism. Traditional mountain culture was depicted in the
periodicals and urban newspapers of the commercial age as
primitive, barbaric, and violent. Journalists and scholars,
intrigued by the discovery of "our contemporary ancestors,"
encouraged the civilizing intervention of industrial capitalism to
salvage the undisciplined mountain inhabitants.1

The process of intervention in Pocahontas County illustrates the
transformation of traditional culture in Appalachia. As the timber
resources of the northeast and Great Lakes regions diminished in
the 1880s, northern lumber producers turned to the southern
mountains for their new supply. Timbering, the basis for an
economic boom in Pocahontas between 1890 and 1910, changed
dramatically as large-scale investment penetrated the county.
Before the 1890s, the market for sawed lumber in the mountains was
primarily local. The technology of lumbering was simple, costs were
minimal, and the amount of timber cut had little environmental
impact. Small-scale family operations were profitable because there
was little competition from large companies and outside capital.
While the timber industry was on the verge of great growth and
prosperity, the boom eluded the small operators who lacked
developmental capital.2

By the early 1900s, small timbering operations in Pocahontas
County were supplanted by systematic, well-integrated operations in
areas of the county opened up by new rail systems. Previously
unexploited areas were reached by developers eager to supply the
industrial northeast. Thousands of mountaineers gravitated to the
timber camps to work for cash wages, signifying the first major
form of non-agricultural work in the mountains. Lumbermen who had
spent a generation in the Pennsylvania forests migrated to
Pocahontas, and its population almost doubled in ten years. As the
timber industry grew, the mountaineers became less oriented to the
traditional, personalized economy and more dependent on the demands
and fluctuations of the national marketplace. By the 1920s, the
boom in the county was over, and the virgin timber gone, leaving a
clearcut wasteland, devastated by poor logging practices, flooding,
and fires.3

As timber and mineral resources in West Virginia became
attractive, a vast network of political capitalists systematically
assumed control over the nature of development. Industrialists such
as Johnson N. Camden, Henry G. Davis, and Stephen B. Elkins joined
with modernizers working on the state and local levels. They
hammered out a new political culture in West Virginia based on the
developmental ideology of national commercial centers such as
Baltimore, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and New York. The
new system depended more on interest groups than kinship groups,
and on printed communication as well as oral transmission of
culture. Among the features of capitalist intervention was the
regular propagandizing of potential converts to the commercial
ideology, through favorable reporting and editorial philosophy in
the local press.4

The developmental ethos formalized by the West Virginia power
elite promoted railroad construction, mining, and timber cutting as
the means to wealth and prosperity. Consequently, little known
provisions adopted at the West Virginia Constitutional Convention
in 1872, facilitating the granting, acquisition, and confirmation
of land titles to capitalist speculators, hastened the transfer of
timberlands from mountaineers to developers.5

The practices of land transfer from mountain families to the
agents of modernization varied. Whether legal or extralegal,
ethical or unethical, the transfers were usually voluntary but
hardly carried out between equal parties in the business of land
speculation. Mountaineers had little knowledge of the value of
their lands' resources to industrialists, or of the potential
impact of large-scale mineral extraction and clearcutting. Land had
always seemed abundant, and environmental damage from traditional
agricultural and logging methods, while certainly in existence, was
limited and diffuse. Moreover, ownership carried the tacit
assumption that title was not a deterrent to common use of
wildlands, within certain culturally defined limits. Few residents
resisted the land agents' offers of cash, a rare commodity in the
mountains, for use or transfer of their holdings. Those who did
resist usually lost the rights they claimed to limit capitalist
access to their lands. The litigious "Lawyers Constitution" of 1872
worked to the advantage of speculators, designed as it was to
supersede the obscure land titles, lost deeds, and poor records
common to mountain counties.6

The developmental ideology formulated by national powerbrokers
such as Camden, Davis, and Elkins relied on regional and local
elites for transmission to mountain communities. Each area
contained a small ruling class whose economic power, political
influence, and respectability derived from longstanding residence
and prominence in the community. Often trained in medicine,
business, or law, these men used their prestige to set the stage
for commercial development. Many resident lawyers were retained by
mining and lumber corporations as intermediaries in the acquisition
of land and resources. Furthermore, local newspaper editors,
encouraged by investment opportunities, railroad passes, and access
to the corridors of power, often served as willing accomplices in
the propagation of the liturgy of development. Blending
international and national commentary, local lore, and the
glorification of industrial capitalism, modernizing editors were a
crucial element in the new economic patterns emerging in the
mountains. Forging a link between traditional culture and the
impersonal forces of the national economy, they helped manufacture
local consent to the selling of the mountains, delivering the
region's economy and future to absentee control.7

Those who questioned the prudence of rapid capitalist
intervention did so at the risk of being cast as obstacles to
progress. "The people," wrote James Murray Mason in the 1884 report
of the West Virginia Tax Commission, "have been educated to believe
that our immediate development must be obtained at any cost and
regardless of sacrifices; the public mind has been saturated with
an idea that progress means one railroad where there is no
railroad, and two railroads where there is only one." The report
continued, "the question is whether this vast wealth shall belong
to persons who live here and are permanently identified with the
future of West Virginia, . . . or pass into the hands of people who
care nothing for our state except to pocket the treasures which lie
buried in our hills."8

The career of Colonel John T. McGraw of Grafton illustrates the
ideology and process of development which engulfed the state in the
1880s and 1890s. A lawyer, land speculator, developer, and activist
in Democratic party politics, McGraw embodied the modernizing
spirit which engineered the transformation of the Appalachian
Mountains.

One of McGraw's most ambitious plans for the accumulation of
personal wealth and the modernization of West Virginia was his
design to develop the town of Marlinton and surrounding territory
in Pocahontas County. As early as 1882, McGraw and his partners
Jacob W. Marshall and Dr. Mat Wallace began acquiring tracts of
land in Greenbrier and Pocahontas counties, on the assumption that
the timber and mineral potential in the region would attract
railroad development. McGraw was encouraged when he learned of the
plans of railroad tycoon Johnson N. Camden to extend his West
Virginia and Pittsburgh line to join with the Chesapeake and Ohio
at Marlin's Bottom, in Pocahontas, and gain access to the resources
of the Greenbrier Valley. McGraw purchased farmland in Marlin's
Bottom and embarked on a strategy of development which envisioned
the area as an industrial and commercial center. In September 1891,
McGraw and other investors incorporated the Pocahontas Land
Development Company to promote the enterprise. Among the
incorporators were some of West Virginia's most powerful
businessmen/politicians, including Camden, Davis, Aretus B.
Fleming, and William A. Ohley.9 In order to generate local interest
in his plans for Marlinton, McGraw laid out lots in Marlin's Bottom
available at auction for local small investors. Thus, local
entrepreneurs had a direct stake, albeit limited, in the success of
McGraw's scheme. Furthermore, by land grants and a guarantee to
construct a new court house, the Pocahontas Land Development
Company induced Pocahontas voters to approve the relocation of the
county seat from Huntersville to the new town of Marlinton. The
location was described by the company as, "a rich, beautiful and
fertile country, among a prosperous, progressive and generous
people . . . a place which, in the near future, must develop into
that which nature intended it to be, one of the Best Towns in West
Virginia." Prudent men were advised to invest their money "in
[their] own state and community and thus benefit by the rapid
development and marvelous growth, which thoughtful capitalists and
their railroad enterprises are bringing to the interior of West
Virginia."10

Plans for the anticipated boom in Marlinton were
enthusiastically endorsed by a progression of editors of the town's
newspaper, the Pocahontas Times, which also relocated from
Huntersvilie with the transfer of the county seat. Editor John E.
Campbell reported early in 1891 that "Pocahontas County will
undergo the greatest development and prosperity of any County in
the State in the next five years. She will have a railroad, and the
industries that will spring up from it will furnish employment to
thousands of families. She has iron and coal and untold millions of
feet of lumber, which speaks for itself." Campbell described the
Pocahontas Land Development Company as

. . . composed of men of wealth and influence prone . . . to
make Marlinton a city, and we have every reason to believe they
will, knowing as we do the vast surroundings of timber, coal, iron
ore, limestone, building stone, fire clay, and in fact everything
that is calculated to furnish for ages to come, industrial
manufacturing plants of almost every description. . . . Ex-Senator
Camden says that Marlinton will become at no distant day the
largest manufacturing city in the interior of the State.11

The gentlemen of the Marlinton company, said Campbell, "are
among the leading citizens of West Virginia and have the energy and
means to develop the great resources of our county and thus bring
prosperity and happiness to our people." Any who discouraged the
plans of the capitalists, Campbell implied, were disloyal to their
community and inhibitors of progress. The Times predicted
that when Pocahontas established railroad connections with the
commercial centers of the industrial northeast, "it will become one
of the greatest iron and lumber producing regions on earth, which
ages of the most active industry cannot exhaust."12

A lengthy editorial comment by Campbell in January 1892, written
in typically florid prose, encompassed not only the developmental
ideal of industrial capitalism, but foreshadowed the cultural
conflict between the disciplined regimentation of the commercial
world and traditional mountain society:

Confining ourselves to our own mountain county, we can see that
the first bright rays of our prosperity are falling upon us. In the
North, East, South, and West, capital has turned its lynx eyes this
way . . . let us prophecy that when the new shall become old, the
iron horse shall be waking from their long sleep their echoes with
his piercing neigh. A new city has been laid off in the heart of
our county. Men of money are visiting us from all quarters and are
going to the great financial centers and telling their friends of
our iron, our coal, and our timber.

Let us lay aside our petty prejudices and the lethargy of our
long isolation, look at the dawning sun of permanent development,
now, for the first time in all our history shedding his fructifying
rays upon us and "get a hustle on with us." With the right kind of
work performed in the proper spirit, we can make our loved county
of Pocahontas equal to any in our state. . . . Let us waste none of
the golden days of '92. Let us begin to hasten our prosperity
now.13

Marlinton did not become the commercial center envisioned by
McGraw and other developers. In fact, the timber boom came after
McGraw had divested himself of much of his property in Pocahontas
and surrounding counties. The economic slowdown leading to the
financial panic of 1893 inhibited railroad construction nationwide.
Careful surveys revealed engineering obstacles which Camden had
overlooked earlier, and he suspended his construction plans. Land
speculation became perilous, and McGraw's financial resources,
always tenuous, were strained. He transferred much of his land in
Pocahontas, Greenbrier, and Webster counties to syndicates content
to wait out the financial crisis in return for the rich tracts of
spruce, white pine, and white oak. He also acted as an agent,
purchasing land for other investors. McGraw's clients included H.
H. Craig of the Rochester Lumber Company and New York capitalists
Cornelius Vanderbilt, H. McKay Twombly, and W. Seward Webb, for
whom McGraw engineered the purchase of three hundred thousand acres
of West Virginia coal and timber lands in 1897.14

Because of the potential represented by timber resources, the
railroad finally arrived in Marlinton in October 1900. The
Chesapeake and Ohio began construction of the Greenbrier Railroad
branch from Ronceverte to Marlinton in 1899, reaching the forks of
the Greenbrier River where the lumber town of Durbin had been
established, and short-term prosperity based on timbering came to
Pocahontas County. The West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company built a
large sawmill at Leatherbark Creek, and tanning, lumbering, and
pulpwood production formed the basis for capitalist transformation
of the traditional culture of the region.15

The economic and social impact of West Virginia Pulp and Paper,
indeed of the timber industry in Pocahontas generally, are directly
linked to the life and career of a prototypical liberal modernizer,
Andrew Gatewood Pinkerton Price, 1871-1930. A gifted lawyer,
respected citizen, and editor of the Pocahontas Times,
Andrew Price bridged the gap between the rural, tradition-bound
mountaineers and the captains of industry who came to dominate this
development. Price, and hundreds of other local elites of similar
background and accomplishments, expedited the transfer of
Appalachia's wealth from the region, putting it at the disposal of
the national economy. In so doing, local modernizers helped
establish patterns of dependency which survive in West Virginia,
and institutionalized the structure of economic and social
inequality which impoverished the state's people.

On November 14, 1892, control of the Pocahontas Times
passed from John E. Campbell to the Reverend William Price and two
of his sons, James and Andrew. The elder Price, one of the county's
most respected citizens, was a Presbyterian clergyman for
sixty-three years. His wife Anna Randolph Price, of the Virginia
Randolphs, was a poet of genteel background who, according to a
son, never successfully adapted to the mountain life or culture.
The Price family had been established in the Pocahontas area for
several generations.16

Andrew Price earned a law degree from West Virginia University
and began practicing in Pocahontas in 1892, the same year he became
part-owner and editor of the Pocahontas Times. He served as
editor until 1900, relinquishing his duties to his younger brother
Calvin, when his prospering law practice demanded his complete
attention. Price retained his partnership in the paper until 1906,
and was a contributing editor until his death at age fifty-nine. He
married Grace Clark in 1897, and the marriage produced two
daughters.17

In 1900, Price was elected the first mayor of Marlinton. He was
the attorney for the Bank of Marlinton, as well as for several
timber companies, railroads, and the Pocahontas Tanning Company.
Described in a 1930 memorial as a Calvinist, Price was a deacon in
the Marlinton Presbyterian Church, displaying a firm belief in the
teachings of the Bible, but with an aversion to the "spectacular."
He was an accomplished poet and geologist, and a "clever writer"
whose columns were often carried by newspapers around the state. A
lifelong Democrat, Price was nominated for the United States House
of Representatives in 1908, and appointed postmaster at Marlinton
by Woodrow Wilson in 1913, serving until 1922. He was a founder of
the West Virginia Fish and Game Protective Association, and at
various times served as president of the Pocahontas Bar Association
and the Board of Education of the Edray District. He was an
organizer of the West Virginia Historical Society and its president
until shortly before his death. Price was known as the "Sage of
Pocahontas," and was described at his death as the leading citizen
of the county. An appreciation written by fellow lawyer T. S.
McNeel declared,

His wide field of activity gained for him an intimate contact
with persons in every walk of life. . . . The learned and the
unlearned, the adult and the youth, the aristocrat and the masses,
all alike found in him a charming companion because of the human
touch of the man. The lowly enjoyed easy approach into his
presence.18

Even with the reverential tone of McNeel's eulogy, it is not
idle speculation to assume that Price, with his long family
association in the county, apparently respectful manner, Calvinist
discipline, and literary, legal, and scientific accomplishments,
would be a man of influence among all classes of Pocahontas County.
As such, he was apparently a valuable agent for the intervention of
industrial capitalism. Price's editorial statements and
professional alliances reveal a man convinced of the moral
imperative and guaranteed prosperity of industrial expansion into
the woods of Pocahontas. While at times he wrote nostalgically of
traditional culture, he affirmed it must accommodate the tide of
progress.

Price, a partner in the firm of Price, Osenton, and McPeak,
corresponded with an extensive network of political and industrial
elites, statewide and nationally. He represented many corporations
in land title and right-of-way condemnation proceedings, and as
bank attorney protected its interests in land deals and
foreclosures. His position as counsel for West Virginia Pulp and
Paper illuminates his dual roles as protector of the company's
interest and propagandist in the Pocahontas Times. In a 1911
letter to J. S. Alexander of the National Bank of Commerce in New
York, Price defines his relationship with the company:

Dear Sir:

Your letter to the Bank of Marlinton in regard to the financial
standing of the West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company . . . has been
handed to me as attorney for the bank to answer. I am also local
attorney for the concern that you inquire about, but do not know
very much of their business holdings outside of this county and
adjoining counties. This company holds here about 140,000 acres of
good land valuable for timber and coal. I think this land is worth
something like three million dollars. The company has in addition
valuable railroad and mill property, and is now building an
important railroad under the name of the Greenbrier, Cheat, and Elk
Railway connecting the C&O, B&O, and Western Maryland
railways, and is developing a county rich in coal and timber, of
which the company owns a large part of it.

The men who manage the company, the Messrs. Luke, Mr. Cass, and
Mr. Slaymaker, are men of the highest type of business integrity,
and are conservative and safe men. It is one of the strong
companies of America.19

Price had been defending the prerogative of West Virginia Pulp
and Paper for years. While fighting litigation over alleged
pollution of the Potomac River below its pulp mill at Luke,
Maryland, West Virginia Pulp sought to purchase one hundred and
fifty thousand acres of farmland in Caldwell, West Virginia, for a
pulp mill. Town officials of Hinton, located downstream from the
proposed mill on the Greenbrier River, objected, eventually
compelling the company to build at Covington, Virginia. As the
controversy over the company's plans for Caldwell ensued, editor
Price was quick to defend West Virginia Pulp and reassure the
citizens of Pocahontas and Greenbrier counties that their lands and
waters would remain pristine. He claimed the proposed mill and rail
connection "will place every citizen within ten miles of a
railroad, [and] put hundreds of thousands of dollars into the
county." The Times also cited "expert testimony" from the
Maryland pollution trial confirming the environmental sensitivity
of the company. "The wood used is spruce," according to the
Times, "[and] there is no unhealth in water impregnated with
the tannic acid of sprucewood. We do not apprehend any serious
trouble for the people living below Caldwell."20

Price elaborated on the environmental defense in a subsequent
editorial, "We have very little law on the subject of pollution of
streams in this State, our laws being sufficiently strict to
prevent any unnecessary pollution of streams, but not interfering
with an industry such as the pulp mill." Quoting a "prominent West
Virginian, who loves the shaded woods and a clear stream," Price
remarked,

He said it is a sacrifice we must make to progress. We cannot
afford to keep back the development of our country for the sake of
a stream of water, and the day is coming when we will have to go
back in the woods to find pure streams. You cannot change a forest
to farmland without polluting to a considerable extent the streams
which drain it. It is the price we have to pay for the benefits of
civilization.21

Price equated the discharge from pulp mills with the natural
process of drainage from spruce forests into the streams of
Pocahontas County. The tannic acid produced the "inky blackness"
common to local streams which natives could attest were
well-stocked with healthy fish. Chastising the obstructionists to
progress in Hinton, Price lamented, "it is extremely unfortunate
that West Virginians could not have understood the [limited] extent
of the pollution by such a mill before they drove the industry out
of the state."22

Price's defense of the environmental responsibility of industry
extended to other companies which retained him as well. Ironically,
his strongly-worded communique to a West Virginia legislator lauded
a company which he implied was a greater steward of the land in
Pocahontas than West Virginia Pulp. In defense of Pocahontas
Tanning, Price wrote to the Honorable Jake Fisher:

Of all the industries known to this state, tanneries are least
hurtful to fish, and as compared to coal and iron mines and pulp
mills, the tannery sewage is inocuous. I can see no reason
therefore why tanneries should be singled out as the horrible
example. . . . The two large tanneries on Greenbrier River do not
hurt the fish any. . . .23

As legal representative for several timber and railway companies
doing business in the county, Price often participated in the
transfer of land titles and condemnation proceedings to the benefit
of his clients. He once advised Gilfillan, Neill, & Company to
move against the minor heirs of James Kinsport to acquire lands of
the Kinsport estate "before there is a chance of them giving you
trouble." In another case, he advised his law partners that land
deeded from Henry Yeager to "a married woman" was not valid under
West Virginia law because it had not been acknowledged before a
"proper officer." Price concluded that the firm had "a good suit"
and that the timber on the land was "very well worth fighting
for."24

Price also felt obliged to convince Pocahontas Times
readers that land was more valuable to the community when it rested
with timber companies than in the hands of private citizens. Tax
payments on the land, even if unproductive, he explained, benefited
the community and relieved the previous owners of hidden
burdens:

The Greenbrier River Lumber Company's tax ticket in Pocahontas
for the year 1898 amounts to $1539.36. This is tax on timberland
which is unremunerative. It is a great help to the county treasury.
Formerly this tax was divided among smaller landowners who did not
realize how much their wild land was costing them. This is still
true of the greater part of the county.25

Regardless of the efforts of Price and other local elites, some
citizens resisted the encroachment of industrial capitalism.
Resistance to development could take the form of a landowner
refusing to acknowledge the right-of-way prerogative of railroads,
for compensation, through private land. County courts often
convened special hearings for right-of-way disputes, where the
mechanism was in place to protect the interests of big capital.
County judges and court officers were by 1900 usually professionals
or businessmen whose economic well-being was linked to development.
If persuasion "proved ineffective, resistance could be overcome by
the alliance between capitalists and local promoters. Courts simply
condemned land and required that it be sold to the railroad."26

Price advised his readers on the wisdom of settling condemnation
proceedings out-of-court, warning them against being greedy and of
hidden costs in a lost condemnation judgement. "Some of the prices
asked by landowners are too high," he wrote in 1899. "The rule is
when a private contract can not be agreed upon for the condemnation
proceedings to be initiated. If the landowner recovers less than
the amount proffered by the company, he pays the costs, and vice
versa."27

To illustrate, Price wrote to S. E. Slaymaker of West Virginia
Pulp in New York to apprise him of the progress of condemnation
proceedings on 178 acres in Pocahontas County. Obtaining "no
satisfaction whatever" in convincing the owners to accept the
company's offer of right-of-way compensation, Price informed
Slaymaker of a hearing to be held by C. S. Dice, the new judge of
the Pocahontas-Greenbrier district. Price advised Slaymaker to send
a cash draft of the company's offer to be available at the hearing.
He reported shortly thereafter that Judge Dice "seems to be in a
good humor with everybody" and that Slaymaker was "now free to
enter on the lands." Price later informed a Charleston client that
Judge Dice would be hearing the client's land cases in "the
Greenbrier Valley." Price contrived to get his client and Dice
together before the hearing, arranging "a trip for you and Charley
Dice to the Green Fields of Elk River, in the trout country. . . .
You would [sic] better go."28

In addition to his interest in fostering industry in Pocahontas
County, Price and other modernizers were obliged to cultivate a
moral framework compatible with the new age. The social stresses
which accompanied rapid population increases and new economic
relationships mandated greater regimentation and social control
than did traditional mountain culture. The personalized
relationships of preindustrial economies were not well-suited to
the competitive demands of the commercial marketplace. To guarantee
the benefits of economic modernization, local elites set out to
reshape the provincialism of traditional society. Since
mountaineers had gained a reputation for violence and traditional
ways, boosters had to prove that local citizens were peaceful and
willing to welcome industrialization.29

Price used the forum of the Pocahontas Times to promote a
modern, functional moral code for his neighbors, in the style of
the "unspectacular" Calvinist eulogized by T. S. McNeel. While
Price extolled the resourcefulness and honesty of a people who had
"prospered . . . in a quiet way" before capital came to the county,
he admonished his readers to seek the self-discipline necessary to
profit from new opportunities. For example, Price equated education
with success and good moral fiber.

Non-attendance at school, and consequent ignorance thereof, is
truly a menace to the peace and prosperity of our country.

The boy [who] is permitted by his father and mother to exchange
the restraining and refining influences of the school room for the
more fascinating associations of the street corner, where he can
enjoy to his heart's contend [sic] the deadly cigarette, and
a thousand other evils whose certain tendency is to the destruction
of body, mind, and soul; or, if not so bad as this, he may be
placed in some position which he is at best poorly qualified to
fill, and from which he can never rise to prominence or usefulness
in the world.

Some there are who go through life in a dilatory manner, never
prompt in the performance of any duty, never punctual in attendance
upon any important public gathering.30

Like many other modernizers, Price contributed to the negative
mountaineer image by focusing on the damage to order and efficiency
caused by whiskey consumption and latent violent tendencies.
Whether drinking and violence were actually increasing is
debatable, and in any case they could arguably be attributed to the
social instability of emerging industrialization.

Nevertheless, Price cautioned repeatedly that "disregard for law
and order [is] a real menace; at present there is an era of
lawlessness which we must consider seriously. The root of it is the
illegal sale of whiskey." Concealed weapons, another social menace
feared by Price, should be controlled by the vigilance of the
people: "When you take a revolver away from a hasty youth it is
like clipping the claws of a tiger. . . . The condition is such
that every endeavor must be fostered and endorsed by every good
citizen."31

Price's admonition on rowdiness may simply have been the
moralizing of a Calvinist reformer. But it may also reflect his
reaction to widening class divisions in Pocahontas County, just as
in other developing areas, a crisis which escalated after the
timber boom. His warnings were identical to those of modernizers in
other mountain regions where rapid structural changes were taking
place. He occasionally reprinted comments by other editors on the
moral crises, including an 1892 testimonial to Baldwin agency
detectives by the Bluefield Daily Telegraph:

The Organization of West Virginia Railway and Mine Police,
under the management of our intrepid townsman, W. G. Baldwin, and
his able assistants . . . will soon cause the toughs of the Tug and
other points of the Ohio extension to amend their ways or move on
to Moundsville. The better class of people in these regions fully
appreciate the great work they are doing and lend their aid and
influence in every instance.32

Andrew Price played an important role in Pocahontas County by
establishing a foundation for the region's chronic dependence on a
national economy that relied on the resources of local economies,
but treated the economic health of its constituent parts as
secondary and peripheral. Industrial society realigned social
relationships and class orientation in the mountains, resulting in
the potential social upheaval decried by Price. The traditional
agricultural social order, based on the kinship and geographic ties
of independent farmers, had included a flexible and tangible
hierarchy based on wealth and status. The industrial order,
however, mandated rigidly defined class roles: absentee owners
determined patterns of development and received the profits; local
elites depended on the absentees for their own prosperity; and most
mountaineers increasingly became wage earners in the timber and
mineral industries.33

As a prominent representative of the local elite, with the
ability to communicate easily with the mountaineers, Andrew Price
helped set the stage for the patterns of exploitation typical in
the Appalachian Mountains. He parlayed legal acumen, family
heritage, social graces, literary skills, self-discipline, and a
firm belief in the moral rectitude of free-market liberalism to
promote the capitalist penetration of Pocahontas County. While
local elites such as Price consolidated their control of the legal,
social, and economic framework of mountain communities, they handed
over the wealth of their region to men with no cultural obligation
to preserve or renew the sources of that wealth. As absentee
capitalists sought to expand their corporate empires, the
exploitation of rural areas became a "prerequisite of industrial
growth, resulting in unequal economic development between
commercial centers and peripheral areas."34 Sadly, the Sage of
Pocahontas, together with other industrial agents, arranged the
benign betrayal of the land of his fathers.

Notes

1. Altina Waller, Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change
in Appalachia, 1860-1900 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina
Press, 1988), 8; see "Economic Modernization and the
Americanization of Appalachia," Chapter 7 in Henry D. Shapiro,
Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers
in the American Consciousness, 1870-1920 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of
North Carolina Press, 1978), especially 157-62.

3. Eller, Miners, 86, 92; Norman R. Price, interviewed by
O. D. Lambert and Charles Shetler, March 12, 1956 (Marlinton), 1,
Price Family Papers, West Virginia and Regional History Collection,
West Virginia Univ., hereafter referred to as Price Papers. Between
1900 and 1910, the county's population increased from 8,572 to
14,740. In the Greenbank District, which included Durbin and Cass,
the population increased from 2,496 to 6,128. Thirteenth Census
of the United States, Abstract of the Census, West Virginia
Supplement (Washington: GPO, 1913), 577; Pocahontas County
Historical Society, Inc., History of Pocahontas County
(Marlinton: the Society, 1981), 182.

4. John A. Williams, "The New Dominion and the Old: Ante-bellum
and Statehood Politics as the Background of West Virginia's
`Bourbon Democracy'," West Virginia History 33(July 1972):
322-23.

5. Ibid., 321.

6. Ibid.; Eller, Miners, 56.

7. Eller, Miners, 58, 63.

8. West Virginia Tax Commission, Second Report, State
Development (Wheeling: West Virginia Tax Commission, 1884),
3.

9. William Patrick Turner, "John T. McGraw: A Study in
Democratic Politics in the Age of Enterprise," West Virginia
History 45(1984): 9; Pocahontas County Historical Society,
History, 169, 172; Pocahontas Land Development Company,
"Marlinton, Pocahontas County, West Virginia: The Future
Manufacturing and Industrial Center of the Virginias" (Fairmont:
Smith & McKinley, Printers, 1891), 4.

10. Pocahontas Land Development Company, "Manufacturing and
Industrial Center," 4-5.

11. Pocahontas Times, 5 Feb 1891 and 17 Dec 1891.

12. Ibid., 8 Oct 1891.

13. Ibid., 21 Jan 1892.

14. William Patrick Turner, "From Bourbon to Liberal: The Life
and Times of John T. McGraw, 1856-1920," (Ph.D. Diss., West
Virginia Univ., 1960), 97-107.

17. Deposition to the County Court, Pocahontas County, 26 May
1910, Price Papers; Pocahontas County Historical Society,
History, 404; Gibbs Kinderman, "The Pocahontas
Times," Goldenseal 16(Summer 1990): 9-17. Price left an
estate of approximately $20,000 in personal and real property, the
latter appraised at about $5,000 and totaling some 1000 acres in 22
parcels, the largest of which was an 102-acre tract on Buffalo
Mountain. Appraisement of the estate of Andrew Price, Pocahontas
County Will Book, vol. 9 (1929-1934), 169.

24. Price to Gilfillan-Neill & Co., 26 July 1907; and to
Osenton & McPeak, 14 May 1907, Price Papers. The law firm had
offices in Marlinton and Fayetteville.

25. Pocahontas Times, 27 Apr 1899.

26. Waller, Feud, 165-66.

27. Pocahontas Times, 30 Mar 1899.

28. Price to Osenton, 15 Apr 1911; to S. E. Slaymaker, 14 Apr
1911; to W. G. Matthews, 15 Apr 1911; and to Abercrombie &
Fitch in New York, 25 Apr 1911, all in Price Papers. Price ordered
new hip-waders for the fishing trip. He included a check for $5.50
with his request for "easy wading shoes such as you have been
sending to others in this town." Price listed his weight as 220
lbs., wearing a "broad 9 shoe."

29. Waller, Feud, 165.

30. Pocahontas Times, 17 Nov 1892. This is the first
issue edited by Price.

31. Ibid.; Waller, Feud, 204.

32. Pocahontas Times, 22 Dec 1892.

33. Waller, Feud, 204; John Gaventa, Power and
Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian
Valley (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1980), 55-58.